Chris Caulfield’s thoughtful piece (Centre budgets are cut, October 9) is a reminder Tom Brake and Paul Burstow, our two Liberal Democrat MPs, have supported George Osborne’s austerity measures, his cuts, this Parliament.

Osborne’s original plan was to reduce the budget deficit to below £40bn by 2014-15.

It is forecast to be at least double that for two main reasons. First, public sector net debt, which in 2008, at the height of the crisis, was just 52 per cent of GDP, has continued under the coalition’s austerity to rise from 62 per cent of GDP in 2009-10 to 79 per cent of GDP in 2013-14 and throughout 2011 and 2012 under the same austerity the economy flat-lined failing to reduce the budget deficit. 

Second, the so-called recovery lacks substance particularly for the low paid. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis of the August public finances explained that income tax receipts were weak because low-paid workers did not earn enough to take them above the £10,000 threshold to pay the tax.

Plenty of jobs, but many of them badly paid: a substantial number on zero-hour contracts and self-employed workers barely scratching a living.

Closed shops in Sutton high street and the continued need for foodbanks are other indications.

What Professor Victoria Chick and Ann Pettifor showed in 2010, from a century of economic data, that cutting spending increases rather than cuts the level of public debt as a share of GDP. As public expenditure increases, public debt falls and vice-versa.

It is no good Osborne blaming the Eurozone. Austerity has failed there too.

David Murray

 


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